Financially-starved AAR Healthcare Tanzania Ltd has been put under liquidation effective April 22, 2021, ending a decade long presence in the country.

In a statement, joint liquidators, Nelson Emmanuel Msuya and David Timothy Tarimo of PricewaterhouseCoopers, notified the public and creditors that they have taken over the company’s assets and are receiving claims under the ensuing circumstances.

“To enable any claim you may have against the company to be duly adjudicated and considered in the distribution of any realisations from the sale of the assets of the company, please send to the liquidators particulars of any claims,” the joint liquidators said in the notice seen by The EastAfrican.

“The company will shut down all of its operations effective Sunday, 25th April 2021.”

The parent company, Kenya-based AAR Healthcare Holdings, had announced in March 2021 that it was ceasing providing bailout funds and had opted for its ultimate winding up.

Regional presence

Tanzania’s Companies Act of 2002 partly reads; “The creditors and the company at their respective meetings mentioned in section 347 may nominate a person to be liquidator for the purpose of winding up the affairs and distributing the assets of the company, and if the creditors and the company nominate different persons, the person nominated by the creditors shall be the liquidator.”

Reasons cited for the company’s ill performance include reduced visitor numbers to its eight clinics and financial troubles worsened by the Covid-19.

Chief executive of AAR (T) Andrew Rowell then said: “AAR Healthcare Holdings is no longer willing to support the financial requirements of AAR Healthcare Tanzania Ltd and on this basis the board of directors resolved to initiate a creditors’ voluntary winding up process.”

The winding up process involved converging a meeting of the company’s creditors to formally agree on appointing liquidators on April 22.

AAR started in Kenya in 1984 focusing on medical evacuation services by road and air. It entered Tanzania in 2007 as a health insurer till shareholders decided in 2021 “to separate the business into two distinct units, AAR Healthcare and AAR Insurance.”

In Kenya, AAR is a major provider of out-patient healthcare operating 18 medical facilities. It expanded into Uganda in 1994 and Rwanda in 2005.